The Great Leap Sideways

Thought and action are often powered by metaphor. The flagship
metaphor of The High-Tech Imperative is that of a chicken embryo
exponentially growing while unsustainably consuming its rapidly
dwindling food supply. When the chick is growing most rapidly, the
endowment runs out. At this point the parallel between the chick
and mankind runs out: the chick makes the mandatory transition
smoothly, while it is not clear whether and how civilization as we
know it will make it at all.

So far the chick metaphor of Buckminster Fuller. In The Leap [1]
Chris Turner has an alternative metaphor as theme. It is that of a
fast, comfortable train running on bad track that is rapidly getting
worse. So much so that it becomes noticeable, at least to some of
the passengers. Some of these actually dare to look outside and
notice that the track is running along a chasm. The track close
ahead is worse. In the vaguely discernable distance the track seems
to go right into the chasm. On the other side there is a solid-looking
track, one that curves away from the chasm. Turner's point is that
business as usual cannot get the train to run on that other track.
A radical change, a discontinuity is needed; hence "The Leap". The
word is reminiscent of chairman Mao's "Leap". Like his, Turner's
has to be Great Leap, but Sideways rather than Forward.

Throughout the book Turner reviews sustainable energy technologies
and argues that technology is not the barrier that stands in the
way of the Great Leap Sideways. Rather, it is a lack of vision and
of a new way of thinking. To illustrate this Turner goes back to
the New York of 1819. At the time it was not more important than
several other cities in the United States, such as Baltimore,
Philadelphia, or New Orleans.

Traveling to Europe was an expensive and haphazard undertaking: one
could do no better than to travel to New York and find lodgings for
an indefinite amount of time, all the while scanning the newspapers
and visiting offices of shipping companies. For a shipping company
it was counter to all that was common sense to allow a vessel to
depart with a vacant cabin or with space in the hold. Yet this was
exactly Jeremiah Thompson's idea. He convinced partners to join him
in a new kind of shipping venture, one that announced a schedule
of future departures and set sail on the dates advertised, full or
not full. After a short period of painfully underloaded voyages,
the Black Ball Line had all the traffic it could handle. Before
long its competitors had taken notice and it had become inconceivable
that it had ever been otherwise. Thompson's idea had completed the
Three Stages of Truth as noted by Arthur Schopenhauer: ridicule,
opposition, and acceptance as self-evident.

In spite of the dire consequences of not making the Leap, Turner
Turner starts off with a survey of our predicament that is sufficiently
brutal to rattle the most complacent reader. Then one would expect
a rallying cry, a call for mobilization of all resources, resulting
in austerities not seen since WW II, so as to avert the emergency.

Instead, much of the rest of the book is devoted to developing the
idea that thinking-out-of-the-box can transform traffic in cities
in a way that saves energy and enhances pleasure. A pioneer example
is Copenhagen, so much so, that apparently "Copenhagenization" has
emerged as term for the process. Accordingly there are pages of
praises of drinking coffee in the sun on sidewalks (in Copenhagen?
fur coat and boots, I guess). His analysis is apparently that
prospects of austerity will have no effect while giving sybarites
the prospect of enhanced pleasure has a chance of getting things
going.

The subtitle is similarly upbeat, and aimed at readers of the
Business Section in the Globe and Mail: "How to Survive and Thrive
in the Sustainable Economy". Accordingly there is much about the
business opportunities in wind and solar energy. Again, I must
admit, a better chance of getting things moving than dire-sounding
rants. But instead of launching into yet another success story with
dutifully supplied names of CEOs, CTOs, CFOs, Turner could have
inquired into the energy that went into making the tons of steel
for a turbine and what that energy would have cost at a sustainable
price; then calculated how many years it would take to pay this
back. This may be good news; I hope so. I just want to see the
figures.

Turner does not address the important question of what percentage
of total electric power required can come from wind energy. On page
316.5 (paper edition) he mentions that on Bornholm only half of the
generated electricity is used "because of the intermittency problem".
It may have been planned that way -- the data must have been available
before ordering the turbines. Or was it just plain old stupidity?

Turner does report on plans in Denmark to store monentarily unneeded
wind energy in batteries of electric cars. Basically sound, but
beset by practical difficulties. Subsidies aimed at getting people
to buy new cars are the easy part. In the real world cars are parked
in streets and driveways. Even if there is a garage, the car is on
the driveway and the garage is stuffed with junk. I enjoyed Turner's
book, if only because it provokes the reader to invent improvements
on the schemes reported on by Turner. Let me indulge in a few of
my own.

With a little tweak the idea of storing surplus electricity in
batteries of electric cars can be moved closer to reality. Charging
time (long) is a difficulty with electric cars. Better buy a charged
battery at a gas station, return the depleted battery at a gas
station, and get a charged one for the price of the electricity in
the charged battery. The gas station will have racks and racks of
batteries in various stages of charging. This happens during periods
of surplus wind energy. The gas station discharges electricity to
drivers stopping by and to the grid at times of high price. That
way you need not reform half a million consumers, but only a few
thousand gas stations owned by a handful of companies.

This is only one way of coping with intermittency. Wind turbines
could be installed close to consumers that are not sensitive to
intermittency. The story of batteries in the gas station is but one
example. Draining polders in Holland is another. This can be suspended
during periods when the grid offers a high price. Draining can catch
up on windy nights when almost everyone is asleep. A particularly
good match between production and consumption is between solar
panels and air conditioning. In the tropics and in the US in summer
it may be possible to keep buildings cool mainly by solar panels.

I have left untouched much that is valuable and enjoyable in The
Great Leap. My criticisms can be summarized as a lack of evidence
that Turner has read his fellow Canadian David Scott's book Smelling
Land. If he had done so, he would not have make the remark that
wind turbines compare favourably with nuclear power stations in
cost per installed watt. Hint: the intermittency problem.